What Happened at Beijing

Mary Ann Glendon

"You are going to Beijing to be witnesses," the Holy See's
Undersecretary for Relations with States told us as we left for the UN's
Fourth World Conference on Women last September-daunting words for our
band of fourteen women and eight men from nine countries and five continents.
In the turmoil of the next two weeks, however, the idea of being witnesses
helped our diverse group to coalesce into a unified team that would work,
first, to make the documents issued by the conference more responsive to
the actual lives of women, and, second-in keeping with the Catholic Church's
traditional mission to the poor-to be a voice for the marginalized and
voiceless women who can seldom make themselves heard in the corridors of
power.

We hoped to avoid the situation that developed at the UN's 1994 Conference
on Population and Development in Cairo, where an abortion rights initiative
led by a hard-edged U.S. delegation pushed all other population and development
issues into the background. The Holy See's efforts to correct that skewed
emphasis never got through to the public. [See George Weigel, "What
Happened at Cairo," FT, February 1995-Eds.] For the most part, the
press accepted the population lobby's caricature of the Vatican at Cairo
as anti-woman, anti-sex, and in favor of unrestrained procreation.

Before the Beijing conference opened, indications were that most nations
had little disposition to reopen the fragile consensus that had been reached
at Cairo. The idea that abortion was a legitimate tool of population control
had been expressly rejected in the Cairo document. The U.S. administration,
chastened by the November 1994 elections, was unlikely to openly lead another
controversial charge. And in any event, the Beijing conference was not
a population conference; its mandate was "Action for Equality, Development,
and Peace." On those topics, we believed, the Holy See's positions,
drawn from the Church's teachings on social and economic justice, stood
a better chance of being heard. Our hopes in that regard were only slightly
dimmed by our growing awareness that few media people had a clear idea
of the subject and scope of the Beijing conference.

The failure of the press (and even many delegates) to do their homework
was understandable. The Beijing documents (a brief Declaration and a long-winded
Program of Action) were a 149-page (single-spaced) hodge- podge of the
good, the bad, and the silly. To a lawyer's eye, they resembled a sprawling
piece of legislation, with slabs of ideological pork interspersed among
commonsense provisions and bureaucratic boilerplate. They had been produced,
naturally, by a committee-the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

The drafting process, through two preparatory conferences, was heavily
influenced by population control lobbyists and old-line, hard-line feminist
groups. Negotiators from members of the UN and its specialized agencies
reached agreement fairly easily on the bulk of the provisions, but a large
proportion of the draft documents went to Beijing in brackets, signifying
that no accord could be reached at the preparatory stage.

From the beginning, the documents were at war with themselves in several
respects. Many provisions addressed issues of equal opportunity, education,
and development in a sensible way. But reading the drafts overall, one
would have no idea that most women marry, have children, and are urgently
concerned with how to mesh family life with participation in broader social
and economic spheres. The implicit vision of women's progress was based
on the model-increasingly challenged by men and women alike-in which family
responsibilities are avoided or subordinated to personal advancement. When
dealing with health, education, and young girls, the drafts emphasized
sex and reproduction to the neglect of many other crucial issues. The overall
effect was like the leaning tower of Pisa, admirable from some angles,
but unbalanced, and resting on a shaky foundation.

The first morning's colorful opening ceremony in the Great Hall of
the People was an odd mixture of the sublime and the silly-as though replicating
the conference documents. Mistresses of ceremonies who appeared to be on
loan from the trade show commissariat presided in sequinned evening gowns
over a program that mingled ballet dancers and hula-hula girls, a performance
by the Chinese Women's Philharmonic orchestra and a parade of fashions,
world-class gymnastics and a martial arts display where the women vanquished
all the men.

That was the last hour of relaxation our delegation had until the conference
ended. Our negotiators, four women and three men, worked virtually around
the clock for the next two weeks in as many as seven separate, concurrent
sessions, dealing with the knotty problems that had been left for resolution
in Beijing. The rest of us tried to collect and read reams of conference
documents, to maintain a presence of at least two persons in the plenary
session, to staff our makeshift headquarters, and to "witness"
in our communications with other delegations, the media, and Catholics
attending the parallel women's forum in Huairou.

We were heartened by Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's speech
in the opening plenary session. Mrs. Bhutto zeroed in on some of the defects
in the documents. They were, she said, "disturbingly weak" on
the role of the traditional family and on the connection between family
disintegration and general moral decay. At a subsequent session, U.S. First
Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was clearly mindful of the Senate's bipartisan
resolution instructing American delegates not to denigrate motherhood and
the family. She condemned direct coercion in population control programs
and made several positive references to women's roles as mothers and family
members.

Mrs. Clinton's carefully worded speech was just one of many signs that
the U.S. had drastically overhauled its strategy since Cairo. Throughout
the Beijing conference, the American delegation avoided taking the initiative
on controversial issues. They maintained an appearance of cordiality toward
the Holy See, skirting open confrontation in negotiations. Members of the
U.S. delegation frequently described the Vatican delegation to the press
as "conciliatory"-as though we, not they, had changed since Cairo.
Some of the beans were spilled by one American negotiator, after she had
piped up briefly in favor of rights based on sexual orientation. Later,
she told two members of the Holy See team she had momentarily forgotten
that "we were told not to speak out on that one."

In my opening statement, I reaffirmed the positions the Holy See had
taken at previous conferences, and called attention to several areas where
the Beijing drafts needed to be improved. The documents barely mentioned
marriage, motherhood, and the family-except negatively as impediments to
women's self-realization (and as associated with violence and oppression).
The women's health section focused disproportionately on sexual and reproductive
matters, with scarcely a glance toward nutrition, sanitation, tropical
diseases, access to basic health services, or even maternal morbidity and
mortality. Women's poverty was addressed in narrow terms as chiefly a problem
of equality between women and men, slighting the influence of family breakdown
and unjust economic structures. I pointed out that, without recognition
and support of their roles in child-raising, effective equality would remain
elusive for far too many women. I concluded with the observation that there
can be no real progress for women, or men, at the expense of children or
of the underprivileged.

These points seemed so reasonable to us that, in the first few days
of the conference, we were confident that they would find wide support.
Ominous signs, however, soon appeared. Some delegations from developing
countries seemed less independent than at Cairo. Holy See negotiators were
often receiving short shrift from chairpersons wielding heavy gavels. The
procedural difficulties became acute in sessions dealing with the controversial
health sections of the draft. Many otherwise inactive delegations showed
up, and the negotiating room became especially crowded and chaotic. At
one point, when our negotiator attempted to intervene in support of a bracketed
paragraph urging that women be informed of the health risks of promiscuity
and certain contraceptive methods, the Chair ruled her out of order on
grounds that the Holy See, as a Permanent Observer, did not even have the
right to vote. By the time the Chair was forced to retract that mistake,
the language in question had been eliminated. The tenor of discussion on
the issue is captured by the remark of an Egyptian delegate: "If we
start telling women about the harmful effects of contraceptives, they might
not use them anymore."

By Thursday of the first week, our negotiators were bringing back news
of another unexpected development. A minority coalition, led by the powerful
fifteen-member European Union negotiating as a bloc, was pushing a version
of the sexual and abortion rights agenda that had been rejected by the
Cairo conference. The EU-led coalition was so intent on its unfinished
Cairo agenda that it was stalling negotiations on other issues. Equally
disturbing, the coalition was taking positions with ominous implications
for universal human rights.

Joined by a few other countries (Barbados, Canada, Namibia, South Africa),
the EU was opposing the inclusion of key, pertinent principles from UN
instruments where the nations of the world had recognized certain core
rights and obligations as universal. The controversy centered on five crucial
areas:

To bring the treatment of marriage and the family more into line with
women's actual needs and aspirations, the Holy See and other negotiators
had proposed references to standard international language. The UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights was an obvious source. It makes marriage a
fundamental right, and provides that "the family is the natural and
fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society
and the state" (Art. 16). The EU coalition not only opposed that language,
but pressed to pluralize "family" wherever it appeared in the
documents. This move would have been innocent enough if it simply referred
to the fact that there is no single form of family organization. But here
it seemed intended to place a range of alternative life styles on the same
legal footing as families founded on kinship or marriage, undermining the
legal preferences that many countries accord to child-raising families.

Similarly, the coalition contested every effort to include the word
"motherhood" except where it appeared in a negative light, even
though the Universal Declaration provides that "Motherhood and childhood
are entitled to special care and assistance" (Art. 25).

The coalition sought to remove all references to religion, morals,
ethics, or spirituality, except where religion was portrayed as associated
with intolerance or extremism. During one stormy negotiating session on
women's health, an EU negotiator even opposed a reference to codes of medical
ethics, insisting, astonishingly, that "ethics have no place in medicine."
The coalition also objected to a paragraph providing for freedom of conscience
and religion in the context of education, in spite of the Universal Declaration's
provision that "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience,
and religion . . . [including] freedom, either alone or in community with
others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in
teaching, practice, worship, and observance" (Art. 18).

Though the Beijing documents had identified the situation of the "girl
child" as a "critical area," the coalition attempted to
eliminate all recognition of parental rights and duties from the draft,
even rejecting direct quotations from the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. They seemed indifferent to the fact that the Universal Declaration
and subsequent human rights documents have consistently protected the parent-child
relationship from outside intrusion.

Finally, the coalition made strenuous efforts to remove references
to "human dignity" as used in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights: "Recognition of inherent human dignity and of the
equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" is
the very "foundation of freedom, justice, and peace." They apparently
feared that dignity language might legitimate departures from the equality
principle. Equality and dignity, however, are inseparable in the Declaration.
To eliminate dignity is to undermine the concept that human rights, including
equality, belong to all men and women by virtue of their inherent worth
as human beings, rather than existing at the whim of this or that political
regime.

The EU caucus' assault on key provisions of the universal human rights
corpus was something of a mystery. Europe, after all, prides itself on
being the cradle and custodian of many of these ideas. More puzzling still,
the EU negotiators' stances on these matters were at variance with similar
provisions in most of their own national constitutions and with the underlying
principles of their own family assistance programs.

In the stark vision promoted by the EU caucus at Beijing, there is
no room for the idea that society has a special interest in providing the
best possible conditions for raising children. Family life, marriage, and
motherhood would be worthy of no more protection than any other ways in
which adults choose to order their lives. The girl child, her parents nowhere
visible, would be alone with her rights. A document embodying that vision
would cast a shadow over programs and policies that provide assistance
to child-raising families, just at a time when most countries are already
curtailing their social expenditures. A document on women's issues from
which all positive references to motherhood and family life were removed
would send a discouraging message to women who take pride and satisfaction
in family roles.

The EU negotiators' positions can be explained in part by a phenomenon
Americans know well-the tendency when arguing for a favorite right to brush
aside all other rights and obligations. The EU-led coalition was so single-minded
in its determination to seed the Beijing documents with sexual and reproductive
rights that it was willing to let important competing values go by the
boards. At least that was how it seemed when the Holy See's Ambassador
to the UN, Archbishop Renato Martino, and I met with Christina Alberdi,
leader of the European Union caucus, and, later on the same day, with several
members of the French delegation. We raised our concerns about human rights
issues at both meetings. The delegates and their assistants listened politely,
thanked us for our point of view, but were not forthcoming with any explanation.

After several similar encounters, I was reminded of the Cook County
criminal courts of the 1960s, when occasionally the rumor would go around
the corridors that "the fix was in" on a particular case. I began
to wonder whether a blend of sexism and political expediency had induced
some governments to regard the women's conference as unimportant in itself,
and thus to treat delegation appointments as handy sops to throw to old-line
feminists and population control zealots. That would explain the now unmistakable
emergence of an unfinished Cairo agenda, the hot pursuit of sexual rights,
and the efforts to make sure that parents would not come between their
daughters and those who know better than her parents.

While our negotiators struggled to break that impasse, others of us
spent many hours talking with representatives of various Catholic organizations
who had been attending the women's forum at Huairou. We listened carefully
to the different points of view they brought to the documents. One particularly
impressive group was the Neo-Catechumens- intelligent, dedicated, lay missionaries
who work among the neediest populations in the poorest parts of the world.
They had followed the conference closely, and, at the end of the first
week, urged the Holy See to reject the documents in their entirety. The
Declaration and Program of Action were, in their view, so permeated with
a false anthropology, so obsessed with sexuality to the exclusion of other
issues, so profoundly subversive of the good for women, that the best way
for the Church to witness to the truth would be to denounce them and decline
to join the Conference consensus. As matters stood then, that was a live
option.

Later that day, several members of our delegation made ourselves available
for general discussion with Catholic groups. A glance around the crowded
meeting room, however, revealed that the gathering had also drawn several
inquisitive journalists, the doyenne of American feminism Betty Friedan,
and members of the anti-Catholic, population control front group that calls
itself Catholics for a Free Choice. Few comments from this assembly directly
concerned conference issues. The chief preoccupations of most who spoke
seemed to be power, sex, and the Catholic Church herself.

A great many critical remarks on decision-making power within the Church
and the male priesthood came from Catholic women who seemed depressingly
unfamiliar with basic principles of religious freedom, with the dynamic
feminism of John Paul II, or with the vast range of opportunities for female
and lay participation in Church activities, processes, and ministries.
Even some women with religious vocations seemed to think of the priesthood
as a powerful "job" that ought to be made available on an equal
opportunity basis, rather than a calling to humble self- sacrificing service.

Many of those with whom we met seemed not to realize the number of
opportunities for important service going begging because there are not
enough women or men with the time, desire, and dedication to help. I urged
them to respond to John Paul II's call for women to "assume new forms
of leadership in service," noting his simultaneous call to the institutions
of the Church "to welcome this contribution of women."

Meanwhile, we had reached conference midpoint, and negotiations were
still stalled. It seemed unlikely that the EU caucus' negotiating stances
reflected government policy or public opinion in their home countries.
On Friday night, we composed a press release calling attention to the conflicts
between the positions being taken at Beijing by the EU caucus and settled
principles of national and international law.

By Monday, there was a marked change in the negotiating atmosphere.
Questions had begun to be posed in European legislatures, including the
EU Parliament, concerning what their delegations were up to in faraway
Beijing. "Why did you have to bring all this out in the open?"
complained one EU delegate who was apparently unfamiliar with the concept
of government in the sunshine. Negotiations began moving swiftly, and the
text began to change in some key respects. The final documents were rapidly
taking shape, section by section, in different negotiating rooms, and seemed
to be moving toward something we might be able to accept-at least in part.

The picture in the end was mixed. Many of the best provisions-on women's
education, poverty, the environment, and peace-are likely to wither unless
supported by major financial commitments and nurtured by well- thought-out
programs, while other provisions actually threaten both universal human
rights and the well-being of women.

In favor of the Holy See's associating itself with the documents to
some extent, nevertheless, there were a number of considerations. The heart
of the Program for Action consists of many provisions that are consonant
with Catholic teachings on dignity, freedom, and social justice: those
dealing with the needs of women in poverty; with strategies for development,
literacy, and education; for ending violence against women; for building
a culture of peace; and with providing access for women to employment,
land, capital, and technology. Other worthwhile provisions concerned the
connection between the feminization of poverty and family disintegration,
the relation of environmental degradation to scandalous patterns of production
and consumption, the discrimination against women that begins with abortion
of female fetuses, the promotion of partnership and mutual respect between
men and women, and the need for reform of the international economic order.
The specific economic recommendations mark a healthy break from the discredited
Marxist ideas that once prevailed at UN gatherings. Many central ideas,
moreover, had been introduced by or with the help of the Holy See over
the years (e.g., the emphasis on women's education, and the insistence
that the human being must be at the center of concern in development).

Even the worst parts of the draft documents had undergone some improvement,
thanks to the efforts of our tireless and talented negotiators, Msgr. Frank
Dewane, Patricia Donahoe, John Klink, Msgr. Diarmuid Martin, Janne Matlary,
Gail Quinn, and Sheri Rickert. In the preparatory conferences, they had
introduced equal educational opportunity for refugees; "general access"
for women, as well as "equal access," to education; and the reference
to women's roles as peace educators in the family and society. By the end
of the conference, they had secured references to relevant universal rights
and obligations in all five areas where those concepts had been threatened.

A few swallows, admittedly, do not make a summer. The positive changes
tempered the tone of the documents and maintained continuity with the rights
tradition that will inform future interpretations. But the documents are
still seriously unbalanced. The Cairo principle that abortion must not
be promoted as a method of family planning was eventually reaffirmed, but
the Cairo language on support for parental rights and responsibilities
and respect for religious and cultural values is stronger than in parallel
provisions in the Beijing documents.

Though EU efforts to gain inclusion of the phrase "sexual rights"
were rebuffed, the final documents do contain ambiguous rights language
in the areas of sexuality and fertility. A paragraph in the health section,
for example, speaks of women's "right to have control over and decide
freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including
sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence."
The U.S. was well-satisfied with this result, according to a post-conference
memorandum from Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth
to members of the American delegation. Wirth's evaluation of the Beijing
Platform was that it "met the U.S. government's goals (reaffirm important
commitments made at previous international conferences, including human
rights of women in reproductive health and rights)."

There was no consensus on what the vague new language means beyond
the rights to say no and be free of sexual exploitation. By general agreement,
it does not cover sexual orientation, Canada's energetic efforts to introduce
rights in that area having encountered broad opposition at the conference.

Arguments will no doubt be made that references to women's rights "to
control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility"
implicitly recognize abortion as a human right. Such an interpretation
is excluded, however, by Paragraph 107(k), a direct quotation from Cairo,
which provides: "Any measures or changes related to abortion within
the health system can only be determined at the national or local level
according to the national legislative process." This language was
necessary in view of the fact that, unlike the United States and China,
most countries restrict and strictly regulate abortion. Even nations like
Sweden with relatively permissive abortion laws do not follow the U.S.
in characterizing abortion as a "right." Paragraph 107(k) contains
other language that militates against abortion as a fundamental right:
"reduce recourse to abortion," "eliminate the need for abortion,"
"help avoid repeat abortion." One would hardly say of an important
right like free speech, for example, that governments should reduce it,
eliminate the need for it, and help avoid its repetition.

Even if there were no such specific language in the Cairo and Beijing
documents, it is a basic principle of interpretation that fundamental rights
cannot be created or destroyed by implication. Moreover, the Beijing conference
had no authority to add to or tinker with the corpus of universal human
rights. The UN historically has conducted that process with great care
and gravity, most recently at the 1993 Human Rights Conference in Vienna.
It would indeed be a dark day if human rights could be revised in disorderly
negotiating sessions such as those where the Beijing health sections were
rammed through.

As at Cairo, the Holy See was concerned that language on sexual and
reproductive "health" would be used to promote the quick-fix
approach to getting rid of poverty by getting rid of poor people. Much
of the foundation money that swirled around the Beijing process was aimed
at forging a link between development aid and programs that pressure poor
women into abortion, sterilization, and use of risky contraceptive methods.
That point has also troubled distinguished non-Catholic observers. In the
wake of Cairo, Harvard economist-philosopher Amartya Sen criticized a "dangerous
tendency" on the part of developed nations to search for solutions
to overpopulation that "treat the people involved not as reasonable
beings, allies faced with a common problem, but as impulsive and uncontrolled
sources of great social harm, in need of strong discipline." Sen charged
that by giving priority to "family planning arrangements in the Third
World countries over other commitments such as education and health care,"
international policy makers "produce negative effects on people's
well-being and reduce their freedoms." In a similar vein, the British
medical journal Lancet blasted the Beijing documents for a "new colonialism"
designed to control rather than liberate women.

The Holy See's position as the conference came to an end was thus a
difficult one. The documents had been improved in some respects. But in
other ways they were even more disappointing than the Cairo document, which
the Holy See had been able to join only partially and with many formal
reservations. After an intense session in which members of our delegation
shared their views, hopes, doubts, and concerns about the documents, our
assessment of their pros and cons was communicated to the Vatican Secretariat
of State. On Thursday morning, we received the Holy Father's decision:
accept what is positive, but vigorously reject what cannot be accepted.

Accordingly, the Holy See delegation associated itself in part, with
several reservations, with the conference documents. As at Cairo, it reaffirmed
its well-known positions on abortion and family planning methods. It could
not accept the health section at all. A controversy over the word "gender"
that loomed before the conference had been largely defused with a consensus
that gender was to be understood according to ordinary usage in the United
Nations context. The Holy See, however, deemed it prudent to attach to
its reservations a further, more nuanced, statement of interpretation,
in which it dissociated itself from rigid biological determinism as well
as from the notion that sexual identity is indefinitely malleable. In keeping
with the Holy Father's instruction to vigorously reject what was unacceptable,
my concluding statement on behalf of the Holy See was sharply critical
of the conference documents for the remaining deficiencies that our delegation
had tried from the beginning to publicize and remedy.

The most important political lesson to be taken from the Beijing conference
is that huge international conferences are not suitable settings for addressing
complex questions of social and economic justice or grave issues of human
rights. Unfortunately, there is an increasing tendency for advocates of
causes that have failed to win acceptance through ordinary dem-ocratic
processes to resort to the international arena, far removed (they hope)
from scrutiny and accountability. The sexual libertarians, old-line feminists,
and coercive population controllers can be expected to keep on trying to
insert their least popular ideas into UN documents for unveiling at home
as "international norms."

A number of lingering questions about Beijing merit the attention of
investigative reporters. What deals did the affluent nations make with
their client states? Why did the EU caucus champion an agenda so far removed
from the urgent concerns of most of the world's women? Why did delegates
from countries with strong family protection provisions in their constitutions
(e.g., Germany, Ireland, Italy) not break ranks with the EU when it attacked
the spirit of those provisions? Why were the conference documents so skewed
from the beginning? Who paid for the voyages of thousands of lobbyists
at Huairou whose main interest was not in women's needs and rights, but
in controlling women's fertility?

American delegate Geraldine Ferraro's description of the Beijing conference
as marking an end to the North-South conflicts that have plagued UN conferences
in the past was disingenuous. The delegations from affluent countries that
battled so boldly at Cairo or Beijing for their ideas about population
control and sexual rights were timid as mice when it came to making commitments
of resources. In defiance of evidence that economic development and women's
education lead to lowered fertility rates, the developed countries made
it clear they wanted population control on the cheap. The relative silence
of Third World delegates on issues vital to women in their own countries
was bewildering. How can one explain that many delegations from poor nations
came to sessions involving sexual and reproductive matters with well- prepared
position papers, yet were absent or silent when resources and other crucial
issues were discussed? Since many of those same delegations entered formal
reservations at the end of the conference, chances are the folks back home
will never suspect that their representatives did not speak up in negotiations
where a few strong voices could have made a difference.

The significance of the Beijing documents should neither be exaggerated
nor minimized. The Declaration and Platform are nonbinding documents that
may or may not serve as international guidelines for the way various private
and public actors deal with the issues they cover. The authority of the
worst parts of the documents is diminished by their vagueness, their inconsistency
with respected international documents, and by the unusually large number
of UN members who expressed dissent. When 43 of 181 nations present have
formally registered serious concerns, it is hard to speak of a consensus.
The authority of the constructive sections, on the other hand, is supported
by consensus and amplified by their similarity to provisions in documents
from other international conferences, most recently the Copenhagen Summit
on Social Development.

The significance of Beijing for human rights is mainly in the nature
of a warning. As the fiftieth anniversary of the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights approaches, the Beijing conference appears to have been
a testing ground for certain ideas and approaches that will be advanced
again. We have not seen the last of the effort to make abortion a fundamental
right, or of the attempt to depose heterosexual marriage and child-raising
families from their traditionally preferred positions. Neither have we
seen the last of selective use of rights language to advance an anti-rights
agenda-exemplified at Beijing by the emphasis on formal equality at the
expense of motherhood's special claim to protection, and by the elimination
of most references to religion and parental rights. Worrisome, too, is
the trivialization of universally recognized core principles through the
attempted addition of vague new rights.

All this is familiar stuff to Americans. At the international level,
it is evidence of the continuing colonization of the universal language
of human rights by an impoverished dialect that has already made great
inroads on political discourse in the United States. Its features include:
rights envisioned without corresponding individual or social responsibilities;
one's favorite rights touted as absolute with others ignored; the rights-bearer
imagined as radically autonomous and self- sufficient; and the willy-nilly
proliferation of new rights.

That dialect contrasts with the broad, rich, and balanced Universal
Declaration where the individual rights-bearer's dignity is resoundingly
affirmed, but the family is recognized as the basic social unit. In the
Universal Declaration, fundamental individual rights are simultaneously
affirmed and situated within the social contexts that determine whether
rights, freedom, and dignity will become realities: "In the exercise
of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations
as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition
and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just
requirements of morality, public order, and the general welfare in a democratic
society."

Not least alarming about the assault on the human rights tradition
by powerful actors at Beijing is that it went virtually unreported. As
far as the American press was concerned, the human rights story was the
Chinese treatment of Harry Wu. To European journalists, it was the failed
efforts of a few Islamic countries to authorize opting out of certain equality
measures on cultural and religious grounds. The U.S. was correct, of course,
to condemn brazen violations of universal rights. The Europeans were right,
too, that human rights ought not to be nullified by cultural exceptions.
But neither should the catalog of human rights be redefined and expanded
to "universalize" the highly individualistic ideologies of modernizing
elites. Nor must human rights be sharply separated from the cultural and
religious contexts in which rights are rooted and protected. Nor must the
corpus of core rights and obligations be casually altered. As memories
fade about why it was necessary after World War II to affirm the existence
of certain inalienable rights, the citizens of the world must be vigilant
to prevent trivialization and dilution of those basic protections of human
dignity.

In the end, one may hope that the good in the nonbinding Beijing documents
will survive and flourish-especially since, as any good feminist would
say, they must be seen in context. The context in this case is the framework
of the overarching universal human rights tradition.

John Paul II's instruction to his Beijing delegation reflected the
approach he has taken to women's issues in his writings. In the 1995
World Day of Peace message, he noted that "when one looks at the
great process of women's liberation," one sees that the journey has
been a difficult one, with its "share of mistakes," but headed
toward a better future for women and the entire human family. In his recent
Letter to Women, he added, "This journey must go on!" It
is characteristic of this Pope that, in confronting flawed human enterprises
of various sorts, he seeks to find and build on what is sound and healthy,
while identifying and criticizing what is likely to be harmful to human
flourishing.

Looking toward the future, the Pope stressed in his pre-conference
message to Secretary-General Gertrude Mongella that the success of the
gathering will depend on whether it offers a "vision capable of sustaining
objective and realistic responses to the struggle and frustration that
continue to be a part of all too many women's lives." Ultimately,
it is up to concerned citizens, women and men, to bring the seedlings of
"equality, development, and peace" to full flower, and to protect
them from the encroaching culture of death. Fortunately, we do not garden
alone. Not only are we surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, but divine grace
is always operating in the world, inviting us to cooperate with it in building
the civilization of life and love.

Mary Ann Glendon, who led the Vatican
delegation to the Beijing Conference, is the Learned Hand Professor of
Law at Harvard University.